Gin makes a grand revival in the Bay Area

It looks like just another Hawaiian shirt — a common-enough wardrobe choice for Martin Cate, proprietor of tiki bar extraordinaire Smuggler’s Cove and a well-known expert on rum.

But when you look more closely, you realize that in place of a tiki shirt’s pineapples and palm trees, Cate’s custom-made print features juniper berries, citrus, star anise, coriander, all-spice and nutmeg — the botanicals particular to gin.

The shirt is an apt way for the rum lover to signal his transition to another storied spirit.

Next month, Cate and partner Alex Smith plan to open Whitechapel, a gin bar in the Tenderloin. It will have more than 400 gin varieties and dozens of historic cocktails in a steampunky setting meant to evoke an abandoned London underground station in the 19th century.

Through Whitechapel, the pair hopes to revive public interest in the spirit, which in their eyes has spent the past half-century maligned, misunderstood and forgotten. “We’re trying to make gin fun again,” Cate says.

Fun is more than a platitude to Cate — it’s the reason he got into tiki in the first place. He loved the fantasy of tiki bars like Trader Vic’s, and made Smuggler’s Cove into a triumph of pufferfish lamps, water features, orchid-adorned cocktails and flaming punch bowls.

Photo: John Storey, Special To The Chronicle

Martin Cate at his tiki bar, Smuggler's Cove, in San Francisco's Hayes Valley neighborhood, in 2013.

Martin Cate at his tiki bar, Smuggler's Cove, in San Francisco's...

But the bar’s frequent place on lists of the country’s best mostly has to do with Cate’s obsession with rum. Along with more than 500 bottles, including some rare and vintage, Smuggler’s Cove’s multipage menu covers rum drinks from colonial America to pre-Prohibition Cuba. It’s a survey in the history of the global scope of the spirit, which Cate is distilling into a book for Ten Speed Press next year.

His latest quest for gin knowledge looks to feature the same contours.

Cate, turning 42 next week, hasn’t always been a cocktail history buff. But he has always been interested in the ebb and flow of empire — in which spirits such as rum and gin have been historical players.

The Bay Area native studied political science and European history at UC Santa Cruz with aspirations to work somewhere high in government trade policy. A few years later, he found himself in what he describes as “the trenches of trade,” handling containerized export cargo logistics for shipping companies. Outside of work, he collected tiki vintage mugs and menus.

When the company he worked for went bankrupt, Cate decided to make his passion his career. With partners, he began looking for space for a tiki bar; that eventually become Alameda’s Forbidden Island. He also worked bartending shifts at the legendary, now-shuttered Trader Vic’s in San Francisco, where he experimented with his own tiki concoctions.

Photo: Russell Yip, The Chronicle

Martin Cate, left, and Alex Smith worked together at Cate's Smuggler's Cove in Hayes Valley. They are teaming up to open the gin-centric Whitechapel in S.F. later this year.

Martin Cate, left, and Alex Smith worked together at Cate's...

The real turning point came when a Trader Vic’s co-worker suggested Cate join the United States Bartenders Guild. He went to a meeting at Tommy’s Mexican and found a community of engaged, thoughtful bartenders interested in the same nerdy details about the history and lore of drinks.

“I called my wife and I said, ‘I just figured out what I want to do for the rest of my life,’” he says.

After a few years of pouring scratch tiki cocktails at Forbidden Island, Cate sold his shares and opened up Smuggler’s Cove in Hayes Valley. At Smuggler’s, he expanded the vision: Instead of just 40 years of tiki culture, he would tell the 300-year history of rum through his menu. He also pioneered the bar’s Rumbustion Society, a club that rewards customers with merit badges, brass plaques and distillery trips the more of the bar’s rums that you taste.

Cate wasn’t really considering branching out until he was approached by bartender Alex Smith, who had been the opening manager at Smuggler’s Cove before going on to design the bar program at Gitane, Novela and others. Smith had a number of ideas for collaboration, and a bar centered on gin hit Cate as a chance to tell the story of another spirit with a past.

Photo: Russell Yip, The Chronicle

Martin Cate is set to open the gin-centric Whitechapel in S.F. later this year.

Martin Cate is set to open the gin-centric Whitechapel in S.F....

“Gin has that global quality about it, in the way that rum does,” Cate says. “It’s very easy to explain Scotch or Tequila. Scotch is, you know, made on one half of one tiny island in the North Atlantic. Gin has traveled around the world. It’s been on a journey.”

Blame gin’s fall from grace over the past several decades on James Bond. Most ginphiles do. The moment the debonair secret agent ordered a martini with vodka, not the traditional gin, it foretold the beginning of the spirit’s fall from popularity and rise of vodka.

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The irony is that the two are closer in DNA than one might think. Gin is more or less flavored vodka: a neutral base spirit (often wheat, though it can be made from anything) steeped with assorted plants, herbs and spices. Juniper is the only botanical required for gin to be gin, though coriander, cardamom, orange peel and anise are often present.

Many of these botanicals date back to gin’s origins as genever in 16th century Netherlands, when they were chosen for their curative properties. This early gin hopped over to England with William of Orange and gained the nickname “Dutch courage.” And when war with France resulted in a ban on brandy, Englishmen developed a taste for gin. The spirit traveled on ships bound for far-flung British colonies, most notably India, where some enterprising soldier thought to add it to his antimalarial quinine tonic and invented the G&T that’s been evolving ever since.

Though Cate estimates that there are more than a thousand gins on the market now, a decade ago there were fewer than half that. Vodka dominated the spirits world from the ’60s until the cocktail Renaissance of the early aughts. Interest in craft cocktails revived pre-Prohibition spirits like rye and gin, and distilleries like Hendrick’s and Aviation began making new gins that softened its junipery bite. This revitalized interest in redefining the spirit has resulted in gins modified with matcha and aged in Cabernet barrels; Copenhagen’s Nordic Food Lab even released a gin infused with red wood ants.

To celebrate this new diversity, bars and restaurants around the city are beginning to have notable gin programs, but when Cate was thinking how to dissipate the spirit’s stuffy reputation, he wondered: What if you were somehow able to tiki-ize the gin experience?

If you’re Martin Cate, that looks something like what will become Whitechapel. The premise is both simple and silly: Two gin-swilling chaps in the 19th century stumble on an abandoned London Underground station and make it their clubhouse. Expect ornate, overstuffed furniture in a decaying industrial atmosphere, dropped into the Tenderloin.

Cate likes themed bars and he likes the effect they have on customers. “We want to make a space that really takes you out of San Francisco, out of your job, out of your stresses and into just a complete fantasy world,” he says.

Like Smuggler’s Cove, the long menu will double as a historical survey. Smith designed a 22-drink Martini Family Tree that takes you through the cocktail’s evolution from the 1840s to the present. There will be gins and tonics, regional flights and vintage varieties to try (“time travel in a bottle,” as Cate likes to call it).

Many cocktails will feature Whitechapel Victorian Dry Gin, a custom blend Cate and Smith designed with San Francisco’s Distillery No. 209.

Gin can be tricky to work with because it's both a base spirit and modifier, but Cate and Smith have come to love it for its difficulties. Often it takes a few tries to find the gin that clicks in a new cocktail; one may be too citrusy, another may have too much anise. But when you find the right one for the job, the gin transforms and elevates the drink's other ingredients. “There's nothing else like it. It's alchemy,” Cate says.

To help others share their affection, the pair created a Smuggler's Cove-like gin club, which will help customers navigate the bar’s massive collection. That club will affectionately be named the Polk Street Irregulars, a riff on the Baker Street Irregulars, Sherlock Holmes’ motley crew of street informants.

And person by person, empire by empire, gin will continue its long, strange journey back into the world.